Ships
- HMAS Stuart (D00) In command, April 1942
Stanley Herbert King Spurgeon, recorded in the service as S. H. K. Spurgeon, was born on 15 May 1902 at Alverstoke, near Gosport in Hampshire. He was the second son of Charles Herbert Spurgeon, a naval writer, and Harriet Rosina, née King. In 1912 his father took a post with the Commonwealth Naval Forces and brought the family to Victoria. Spurgeon entered the Royal Australian Navy as a cadet in December 1915 and was made midshipman on 1 January 1920. His first ship was the cruiser Brisbane. That August he moved to the battlecruiser Renown for her cruise around the world. After further time in Royal Navy ships he came back to Australia in 1924 and was promoted lieutenant on 1 February that year.
He specialised in anti-submarine work. Promoted lieutenant commander on 1 February 1932, he served as anti-submarine officer of the Australian Squadron in Stuart during 1934 and 1935, and again in the cruiser Canberra in 1937 and 1938. Between those staff appointments he had his own destroyers, Voyager from August 1935 into 1936 and Waterhen in 1936 and 1937. He was promoted commander on 31 December 1937.
On 3 April 1939 he took command of the Royal Navy destroyer Echo. Late that year he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, the first gallantry decoration given to an officer of the Royal Australian Navy in the war. In 1940 Echo went to the Norwegian campaign. He left her on 11 February 1941 and was back in Australia by October.
On 5 January 1942, at Williamstown in Victoria, Spurgeon assumed command of the Scott-class flotilla leader HMAS Stuart. Hector MacDonald Laws Waller had taken the same ship through the Mediterranean fighting and had since gone to Perth. Stuart was completing a long refit. In April 1942 Spurgeon was in command as that work finished: she sailed from Melbourne on 7 April and reached Sydney on 9 April. From there she settled into escort work along the Australian east coast and up into New Guinea waters.
The pattern continued through the rest of his time in her. In August 1942 Stuart took the transport Poyang from Brisbane to Noumea, then brought the damaged cruiser Chicago and the destroyer Mugford south, reaching Sydney on 27 August. In September and October she joined operations against Japanese forces on Normanby Island and Goodenough Island. Spurgeon remained in Stuart until January 1943, when Neil A. Mackinnon relieved him.
In May 1943 he became director of the anti-submarine division in Melbourne. In that post he was the senior authority on anti-submarine matters in the South-West Pacific Area, charged with the practical and technical planning of those measures and with the flow of information that supported them. He was appointed OBE in 1954, later held the rank of captain on the emergency list, and died at Camden, New South Wales, on 19 August 1982.